Well, like it or not, the image was there. Yes. There it was. No going around it, no dismissing it. There it was in all its glory, Millie’s privates with a small triangle of trimmed, shaped black hairs right above it.
Millie was unshy, unabashed, clearly proud of what was there.
Flashback to Marie. Yes. Crackhead-like Marie, skinny, bony, hyper and wild. She’d chased Bill then like Millie was now. Except then he wasn’t actually married, so he wasn’t actually cheating. Then, Henry Lee pushed her on him, for want of a better word. Then, it was easier to just do it than it was to continue to resist.
Looking back, despite its hassles, and it had plenty of hassles, he couldn’t say it wasn’t fun. He couldn’t say it wasn’t interesting or pleasurable or even exciting.
Was it worth it? He couldn’t say if it was or it wasn’t. In the long run, and in the scope of things, it was neither here nor there, or in his own more crass terms, it didn’t mean shit to a train.
It was. It simply was.
And Millie? SSDD. Same shit, different day. Different girl, different place, different situation. Same shit.
So he stowed away his clean uniform in his locker. Now he had three clean uniforms all nicely starched and in his size. He closed and locked the locker and headed off upstairs to the main kitchen.
Jimmy Banquet Chef was waiting for him by the service elevator. Well, he wasn’t actually waiting for him per se. He was standing by the elevator when Bill walked out. He had one foot up against the wall he was leaning on and he was smoking a cigarette.
“Kalimera,” he said, seeing Bill.
“Kalimera,” Bill said.
“You ready?” the banquet chef asked.
“Sure,” Bill said.
Jimmy dropped his cigarette to the floor and crushed it beneath his work boot. “Let’s go,” he said. “We got thirty-five tenderloins to roast. I already have them set up.”
Sure enough, all over the counters/tables by the rotary oven were roasting pans inside of which were four whole beef tenderloins evenly spaced. Each one was trimmed and tied by the butchers downstairs in the butcher shop.
“Jimmy G and Victor are defrosting the broccoli. We’ll check them out after we get these inside. I already got the oven heating up to 500.”
Bill was not flabbergasted. He was not awed. It was a lot, for sure, and a routine that was new to him. But he’d done volume cooking before, just not this much all at once.
Jimmy Banquet Chef pointed to a bain marie filled with cooking oil in which sat a long handled brush, a kitchen/cooking brush very similar to an artist’s half-inch or inch wide paintbrush.
“That one’s yours,” he said. “And those are yours,” he said pointing to a whole section of the roasting pans with tenderloins in them. “Brush them with oil then salt-and-pepper them generously.” He picked up his own bain marie and held it in hand. “Start at the end, I’ll meet you in the middle.”
And so they both began oil painting. Tenderloin by tenderloin, pan by pan, they painted and then salted and peppered the meat. While they were working a loud alarm sounded. Bill knew that the big monster rotary oven had reached 500°.
